What is one of the most important factors in improving performance in a hybrid team?

What leaders of hybrid teams can learn from the 1980s US 'Starwars' defence programme

How can you create and maintain high performance in a distributed hybrid team?

I discuss this question in chapter two of my new book

‘Leading Hybrid Teams: How to build trust, collaboration, and a high-performance culture,’ which is out in spring 2024.

One lesson comes from an unlikely source: the work of Thomas Allen on the 1980s US ‘Star Wars,’ defence programme.

Below, is a short extract from chapter two, ‘How to Build a Group Identity in the Hybrid Organisation,’ where I tell you all about:

• How people form strong attachments to each other, to organisations, and to places

• How to use this knowledge to improve recruitment and retention of top talent;

• Thomas Allen, the ex- US Marine turned academic,

• Ronald Regan’s Star Wars defence programme and

• How the Allen Curve could help you solve the problem of improving performance in your hybrid team.

“Two teams of people with similar qualifications and experience are both working to solve hard problems. One of the teams is excellent; they are competent and quick at getting to the answer. The other team is mediocre at best. What factor separates the excellent team from the mediocre team?

This was the problem given to Thomas Allen to solve. Allen was a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He had an unusual background for a management school. He was a working-class boy with degrees in computer science, engineering, and management. Before his academic career, he had served with the US Marines in the Korean War and worked for big corporations such as Boeing. He was a perfect choice to lead the project.

Thomas Allen

This was the 1970s, when the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was driving much government research, particularly in the US. These were the years leading up to Ronald Regan’s ‘Strategic Defence Initiative’, nicknamed his Star Wars programme. Government and a few private-sector technology companies were working on really difficult problems such as how satellites communicate with each other in an early-warning system for a nuclear attack.

There was a big difference between the effectiveness and efficiency of teams that at least on paper, looked equally qualified. This difference puzzled and concerned the US government, and they commissioned Thomas Allen and his team to find out what was going on.

Allen set about this challenge by finding what he called ‘twin projects’. These were projects of equal complexity being worked on by research and development (R&D) teams who were as much as possible equally matched in terms of qualifications and experience. He then looked at the overall quality of each team’s work, considering how creative or innovative their solutions were, how practical they were, and how long it had taken each team to come up with their ideas. Allen then went on to look for any common factors shared by the successful teams (Allen, 1977).

The big stand-out factor in the successful teams was how well the individuals in that team worked together. The great teams had chemistry. They frequently talked to each other, and they helped and at times robustly challenged each other. There was a degree of conflict but an absence of hard feelings. Allen said that the factor that separated the successful R&D teams from the mediocre R&D teams was the quality and frequency of communication between team members.

The next question Allen set out to answer was why some teams communicated well and others didn’t. After all, the team members in the successful and less successful groups looked at least on paper to be very similar people.

First he looked at the obvious common-sense factors. Were the successful teams, on average, younger? Did they have more/fewer female members? Were they better qualified or had the team members attended more prestigious universities? Were they more experienced (what was the average number of years of postgrad experience?).

None of these factors made any difference. Essentially, the members of the successful and least successful teams were more or less identical. Talent – meaning education, qualifications and experience – made no difference in how well the teams communicated and the outcomes they produced.

Having ruled out human factors, Allen then turned his attention to environmental factors. And it was here where he found the answer. The reason why teams communicate well or not is a simple one, and one that I’m guessing Allen least expected.

The only factor that made a difference was the distance between the team members’ desks! Allen found a very strong correlation between physical proximity and frequency and quality of communication. The closer somebody is to us, the more we talk to them and have richer, more meaningful conversations.

When Allen plotted the frequency of communication against proximity, he came up with a curve that looks like the letter J on its side. This is what eventually became known as the Allen Curve (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1: The Allen Curve

If your team members are six metres apart, the frequency and quality of communication goes through the roof. If team members are 50 metres apart, they become strangers. If your R&D team is spread over different floors, you may as well pack up and go home. ‘It turns out that vertical separation is a very serious thing. If you’re on a different floor in some organizations, you may as well be in a different country,’ Allen remarked.

The Allen Curve and the hybrid team

Thomas Allen’s work was done back in the 1970s with engineers who worked in open-plan offices. How might it be relevant to leading a hybrid team?

The Allen Curve is consistent with the attachment theory literature. Attachment theory is a theory of proximity. The closer we are to those we feel attached to, the happier we are. It’s a reasonable assumption to make that if teams feel happy or relaxed, they might talk more and ‘play’ more – in other words feel free to be creative.

It would seem that hybrid working would throw a spanner in the works of the Allen Curve. How can Thomas Allen’s findings be relevant to a team disrupted and disconnected by hybrid working?

Allen anticipated this question back in 2007, when the development of the internet allowed some people in the corporate world to occasionally work from home. He used data from studies of email use and from his own earlier research on communication across different sites in a manufacturing company. He said the Allen Curve predicted communication just as it did with the engineers in the open-plan office. He explained:

We do not keep separate sets of people, some of whom we communicate with by one medium and some by another. The more often we see someone face-to-face, the more likely it is that we will also telephone that person or communicate by another medium. (Allen & Henn, 2007) 

In other words, if you have a colleague working at a different company site, you are far more likely to communicate with that person by phone or email if you have actually met them, face-to-face. That seems very relevant to leading hybrid teams.”

What could you do?

Here are three things you can do to build a sense of attachment and boost performance in your hybrid team:

First, make sure that you meet in person as frequently as is possible. Ideally, once a week, but if you’re in a widely distributed organisation even once every quarter will make a massive difference.

Second, when you do meet, use that time for creative tasks, figuring out strategy, or teambuilding. Once you’ve done that, face-to-face, you can then allocate people tasks to go off and carry out when they are working remotely.

Third, when people are together in the office make sure you provide lots of opportunities for people to bump into each other and chat informally. Have an area where there is a coffee machine and make sure people have breaks at more or less the same time so they come together. I’ve never been in a meeting where you ask for people’s opinions and there is a deathly silence; but, as soon as you break for coffee you see people are happily chatting away, offering their opinions without being asked.

If you’d like to talk about how to get the most from your hybrid organisation, drop me a line. I offer keynotes, leadership team workshops, away days, and individual or group leadership coaching.

References:

Allen, T.J. (1977) Managing the Flow of Technology: Technology Transfer and the Dissemination of Technological Information within the R&D Organization. MIT Press, Cambridge.

Allen, T., & Henn, G. (2007). The Organization and Architecture of Innovation. Abingdon: Routledge.

Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. London: Bantam.